It
should come as no surprise to most readers that "objective" government
studies are often anything but. In fact, the game is an old one: If
you put the right people on a panel, and ask them the right questions,
you can pretty well be assured of getting the answers you want. That
appears to be what is going on with a Clinton administration-inspired
National Academy of Sciences study bearing the innocuous title of
"Improving Research Information and Data on Firearms," which opens its
formal hearings on Thursday.

According to
the NAS, "The goals of this study are to

1.) assess the existing research and data on firearm violence;
2.) consider how to credibly evaluate the various prevention,
intervention and control strategies;
3.) describe and develop models of illegal firearms markets; and
4.) examine the complex ways in which firearms may become embedded in
the community."

Conspicuously
absent from these goals is any research into the benefits of
firearms becoming "embedded" in communities, as demonstrated by the
research of scholars like
John Lott of the American Enterprise Institute and
Gary Kleck of Florida State University.

Most of the
people selected for the panel have reputations as good scholars, but
none of them have specialized in firearms policy. Most of them have
reputations as being antigun.
Steven Levitt, has been described as "rabidly antigun."

The panel also
includes former Jimmy Carter Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti — a
long-time antigun advocate, and a strong supporter of America's
leading gun-prohibition group, Handgun Control, Inc. (formerly known
as "the National Council to Control Handguns," and recently renamed
"The Brady Campaign").

The closest
that anyone on the panel gets to not being entirely antigun is James
Q. Wilson — a distinguished scholar (but no specialist in gun policy),
who has said that most gun control doesn't work, but who expresses
almost no concern for the rights of legitimate gun owners who are
harmed by ineffective laws, and who supports high-tech spy cameras to
find people carrying guns. (Notwithstanding the fact that handgun
carrying is legal in 33 states by statewide law, and is allowed in
many of the rest, on a county by county basis.)

The NAS study
will receive $900,000 from the prohibitionist Joyce Foundation, which
lavishly funded the Chicago-Kent Law Review's one-sided anti-Second
Amendment symposium last year, and which has contributed generously to
gun-prohibition groups. It is a fair inference that the Joyce
Foundation thinks that the panel is very likely to produce results
that will advance its mission. Other funders are the Centers for
Disease Control (which was the main funder for antigun junk science,
until Congress cut off funding in 1995), and the David & Lucile
Packard Foundation, which is also a contributor to antigun groups.
Just imagine what gun-control advocates would say if a government
study were funded by the NRA or the Scaife Foundation.

The panel is
supposed to propose "new…control strategies." The idea of repealing
"control strategies" which social scientists have proven to be
failures isn't on the agenda. Nor is there any agenda for "strategies"
to improve public safety by fostering gun ownership and carrying by
law-abiding people — even though social-science data from John Lott
and others overwhelmingly show that this strategy really does reduce
crime.

The reading
packets which have been prepared for the committee are rife with
antigun junk science. The committee members find material applauding
the study claiming that Seattle and Vancouver are demographically
similar (although the latter has virtually no blacks or Hispanics) and
that gun control is the reason for Vancouver's lower homicide rate
(even though Seattle whites have a lower homicide rate than Vancouver
whites, and difference in homicide rates between the two cities is
strongly correlated to Seattle's black and Hispanic population).

The committee
reading packets contain fulsome praise not only for the Dr. Arthur
Kellermann's Seattle/Vancouver junk-science article, but for many of
the rest of his junk-science productions, like the claim that owning a
gun triples the risk of being murdered (even though hardly any of
Kellermann's murder victims were killed with a gun from their own
home, and a significant number of the murder "victims" were lawfully
killed by police, and the whole factoid disappears once you account
for the true rates of gun ownership among the "control group" of
people who weren't murdered).

Or the
ludicrous study claiming that Washington, D.C.'s 1976 handgun ban
reduced homicide — even though homicide in the soared to national
record levels after the ban was enacted, while nearby Baltimore (which
didn't ban handguns) had no such catastrophic increase. It turns out
the "decline" in D.C. homicides was created by pretending that the
low-homicide years of 1975-76 were the products of the 1976 handgun
ban, which was put into place in the last quarter of 1976 through
February 1977.

Not one
sentence in any of the official materials prepared for the committee
criticizes any gun-control law. The committee members were not
given even one of the many social-science articles detailing the
failures of various gun-control laws.

The NAS study
was originally planned during the Clinton administration, and the
study outline and panel makeup ensure that it will produce a properly
Clintonian outcome — just in time for the Democrats to use against
President Bush in the 2004 elections. Rather than go along with this
time-bomb strategy, President Bush should send the NAS back to the
drawing board, to come up with a study that also examines the
benefits, not just the costs, of firearms, and that does so with a
panel containing scholars on all sides of the issue. There is no
reason to allow the National Academy of Sciences to be hijacked to
advance a partisan political agenda through a stacked panel that will
address artificially narrow subjects.

If the Bush
administration and the National Academy of Sciences value honest
research, and value the reputation of the National Academy, they will
see that this study is either canceled, or reconstituted in a fair and
balanced fashion, so that scholars can challenge each other. The panel
should still include scholarly gun-control advocates like Levitt, but
there's no reason for the panel to include people like Civiletti, who
have no social-science expertise. And the funding for a National
Academy of Sciences study ought to come exclusively from the federal
government, not from prohibitionist foundations.

The first
meeting of the proposed study group is scheduled for this Thursday and
Friday, August 30-31. After that, it will become increasingly
difficult to change the course of this study, however ill conceived.

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds posted an update about an
article
we wrote in August 2001, raising concerns about possible bias in a
National Academy of Science panel which was beginning a study of firearms
law. Perhaps our warnings had some effect; the panel's "charge," which we
linked to from our article, focused only on examining the negative effects
of firearms in society. That link is no longer operative, and a more
detailed charge has replaced it; the new charge requires the panel to also
consider beneficial aspects to firearms ownership. Expressing concerns of
the make-up of the panel, we pointed to the appointment of Benjamin
Civiletti (President Carter's Attorney General), who is not a scholar, and
who has well-established anti-gun credentials. Regarding Steve Levitt, a
young scholar at the University of Chicago, we wrote that he "has been
described as 'rabidly antigun.'" Shortly after this article was published,
Steve Levitt wrote to Glenn: "I don't understand your National Review
article in which I am described as 'rabidly anti-gun.' "No one who knows
me would describe me that way. I love to shoot guns and would own them if
my wife would let me. I recently published an op-ed piece in Chicago
Sun-Times entitled 'Pools more dangerous than guns' (July 28, 2001) that
could only be construed as pro-guns. I have never written anything even
remotely anti-gun. I think your sources must have me confused with someone
else." As Glenn notes in an
Instapundit post today, Glenn promptly posted an Instapundit item
noting Levitt's statement about his view on guns. Levitt's Sun-Times
article argues that the risks of gun accidents are grossly exaggerated by
the media compared to other accident risks. I wrote back to Levitt
something which I should have asked then to be posted on this article, so
I'm belated posting it now:

As Glenn's Instapundit site details, we
have checked with our original source. Nevertheless, since I try (not
always successfully) to shed light rather than heat on the gun issue, I
think that in retrospect the adverb 'rabidly' shouldn't have been used.
So I promise to avoid it in the future. I'm glad to know about your
swimming pools piece, and I enjoyed reading it. I did check your
publications page on the web before I submitted the article, but the
pool piece wasn't there -- understandably, since your page just cites
journal articles.

I think that Levitt is mistaken in his
belief that he has "never written anything even remotely anti-gun." In "The
Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," 116 Quarterly Journal of
Economics (No. 2, May 2001): 379-420 (co-authored with John Donohue),
Levitt wrote: "Elevated youth homicide rates in this period appear to be
clearly linked to the rise of crack and the easy availability of guns." p.
395, note 21 ("this period" refers to the late 1980s and early 1990s).

In "Guns, Violence, and the Efficiency of Illegal Markets," 1998 AEA
Papers and Proceedings 88 (May): 463-67 (also co-authored with John
Donohue), Levitt concluded that the presence of firearms lead to greater
levels of violence. He argued that this effect stems not from the
lethality of guns per se, but from how they make the outcomes of fights
less predictable. A small person who knows he would very likely lose a
fistfight to a larger person, will usually choose not to the fight. But if
the smaller person has a gun, he may choose to fight: "Guns are an
equalizing force that makes the outcome of any particular conflict
difficult to predict. All else held constant, this increases the
willingness to fight among weaker combatants, leading to greater levels of
violence." p. 467.

I'm not arguing (at least not in this post), that Levitt's statements are
incorrect, and they are certainly not "rabid." But if a person selecting
panelists for the NAS study were looking for panelists who might be
expected to see benefits from reducing "easy availability of guns," it
would have been reasonable to pick Levitt. There is nothing logically
inconsistent with a scholar favoring gun control to address the very large
problem of criminal homicide with guns, while also recognizing that the
magnitude of the problem of fatal gun accidents involving children is not
nearly as large as the media imply.

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